Vishal Jugdeo "The Thing that Precedes the You" @ Thomas Solomon

When faced with a choice between reinventing a wheel or building a better mousetrap, my guess is that Vishal Jugdeo would opt for the latter. I suppose it might also be another way of asking the chicken and egg question which I suspect is getting closer to his point. Qualitatively, sitting through the video twice, I already felt complicit to some of the questions posed, and didn't need the redundancy of the participatory elements. For me, they end up appearing as a distraction to what I see in this show as essential, some question about the transcendence of difference especially in the face of radically different economic conditions, the contemporary ones of placelessness and absence. What I can appreciate in this work (this show? it wasn't exactly clear to me whether I was looking at a complete installation or discrete, medium-specific, elements, let's call them) was the mediation on thinness, especially as it pertains to materiality and global (social) perspectives. To repeat myself, all of this was in the video, leaving, for me, everything else extraneous and redundant.